This week we were lucky enough to check out beautiful The Gallery Grill at Hart House in The University of Toronto and cook with Chef Suzanne Baby.
Over the years, club has been lucky enough to cook with Suzanne four times before – the first time we made choux pastry, the second visit was a ravioli-making extravaganza, third time we made soufflés and in the spring we made two soups together.
The setting inside Hart House is very “Harry-Potter-esque” and it’s always great to see the boys’ reactions when they walk through the building to get to the restaurant. There’s definitely a lot of the “WOW” factor!
In terms of cooking… Soufflé! Choux Pastry! Ricottoa! Hear that? All “Meant to be difficult” (according to some) recipes and certainly not dishes many people would think about tackling with a dozen (or more) boys in a tiny kitchen in just over an hour… But Suzanne is not “most people”. She is exceptional in that she (as most of the chefs we work with) shares my high expectations of the boys and is always up for the challenge of cooking something “above and beyond” in an hour!
This week she chose to make ricotta gnocchi – a Gallery Grill special, so I can’t post the recipe – which was a wonderful hands-on recipe that kept everyone busy… We measured flour…
Measured ricotta and made sure to consult the recipe a few times to ensure we were including all the ingredients.
Whisked our eggs and ricotta…
Team work at its finest right here:
And then I turned around and saw this:
“But the recipe said to mix with your hands,” said the boy. Um, actually the recipe said “mix by hand” 😉
As a recipe writer working on my first book, this was a huge learning moment for me. The importance of writing a recipe to say precisely what you mean as well as the irony of the boys paying such close attention to a recipe (not always the case in, say, French class) was not lost on me. I always think we need more cooking in the classroom because everyone does pay such close attention!
(so, I’d have written “Use a wooden spoon or sturdy rubber spatula to combine the flour with the wet ingredients”)
Once we’d incorporated all the flour (and washed our hands), we got to forming our gnocchi. Suzanne showed the boys how to form them by scooping up a bit of the dough with their hands and using a spoon to form little logs…
Again, it was a moment when I wondered if there was a way that I could incorporate gnocchi-making into French classes… 😉
Suzanne added a bright tomato sauce and some parsley to the gnocchi once it was cooked…
And the result:
The boys LOVED this. Came back for seconds (even thirds) and took home a hearty portion too!
Thanks to Chef Suzanne and her team for welcoming us into the kitchens yet again (on the day when you were hosting a big dinner too!). The boys had a blast, learned a wonderful, easy and tasty recipe and got to cook in a pretty darned cool kitchen! We are so lucky 🙂